Now & Later
Now
I don’t mind telling y'all that while on one hand I’ve very much been enjoying crafting weekly EM blog posts, on the other, I’m looking forward to soon heading to Deer Park Monastery, and having a break from blogging, website updating, YouTube uploading and social media posting. Some weeks I’ve had great enthusiasm for this side of things, and other weeks I’ve had to really rally myself into doing it all. This week is one of those rallying weeks.
Just this past week, we’ve started moving into our hermitage. It’s still easier for us to use our van as our bedroom on wheels right now, but we’ve moved our Bare Bones kitchen set up from the canvas wall tent into the hermitage and are cooking and eating meals in there. We’ll be giving the wall tent back to our friend that lent it to us in the next couple of weeks. For now though, it’s still serving as our tool storage area and also the temporary resting place of our solar system machine and battery set up. We also still have a woodstove in there, which we use on occasion.
Two weekends ago, we took a drive to my friend Kelly’s house 3-hours away and picked up a woodstove that she and her husband Bruce generously gifted to us for use in our hermitage. The woodstove in the wall tent was a package deal when we borrowed the wall tent. Also: we have a woodstove in our storage unit that we picked up a few years ago for the future purposes of one day being on land with a cabin, but it’s way big and is intended for a much larger dwelling place.
Mike is currently working on installing our used metal roofing, which is from a tear off job his brother did recently. Our windows and door are in, which we picked up at Home Resource in Missoula (our home reuse center), and we’re locked and loaded with insulation. After the roof, we’ll need to install the woodstove, transfer our solar system set up and do a few small odds & ends, and then we’ll be where we want to be for gearing up to head south for the winter.
We contemplated and researched buying a used shipping container to serve as an on site storage unit, but we’re not well set up for having a container delivered just yet. We’ll be holding on to our rented storage unit for now, and using it to house our things over the winter.
Later
When we get back to EM next spring, we’ll need to: side the hermitage, install our final flooring over the OSB sheeting, put up wood slat walls to cover over the insulation, install a window up in the loft (and perhaps another window on the opposite gable end), and figure out our whole kitchen situation (ex: do we put in a sink; do we want cupboards; are we getting a propane fridge…). We also have plans to build a covered front deck on the hermitage as well. So there will be a fair amount of work next year to finalize the hermitage, but it will be livable and warm in the meantime.
We’re already batting back and forth ideas as far as what else we’ll be planning to do next year. We imagine doing some driveway/road building work for sure. We’d like to have our makeshift dirt driveway be more accessible for folks to come and go from, and we’d also like to carve in some places for campers/vans/RV’s to park. I’d also like to get some kind of structure up - either temporary or semi-permanent - that can serve as a community meeting space, as I anticipate organizing and hosting monthly days of mindfulness starting in May or June and also maybe putting together a camping style retreat.
Oh what good practice it is to be in the now with whatever current happenings are taking place, while also balancing possible plans for the future. The now & later of Empty Mountain is an ongoing, step-by-slow-step unfolding process. Who knows what next year will bring? Who knows what even next week will bring?! But one thing is clear: when we practice to take good care of the present moment, we become more able to take good care of whatever happens next, and later.